You do realize that you've just condemned every single corporation in the US as evil, right? By the metric you lay out, every corporation is inherently evil because their stated purpose is to satisfy their greed without regard for the consequences for others. The only thing that keeps corporations from doing horrible things are competitors taking advantage of their missteps and regulations put in place to stop them from doing horrible things - if it's not against the law they can actually be sued by their shareholders for NOT taking actions that are legal and profitable but ethically dubious.

I'm not saying that corporations are evil - I think corporations are amoral and that our laws are structured in such a way that often promotes bad behavior. That's all that happened at Microsoft (and AT&T, and IBM, and just about any historic monopoly you can think of) - they set out to do what they were supposed to do as a corporation - maximize profits - and they push the law as far as they think they can to do it. Microsoft is no more or less evil than any other corporation in the US - they just had greater opportunity for bad behavior than a lot of others because of their runaway success. (And that's the position that Apple is in now as well - now that they're successful they have a lot of opportunity for bad behavior. Count on them using it to maximize profits because that's what they're supposed to be doing. The only real way to counteract bad behavior is either through competition or, if that fails, regulation - there's really no other way to do it given how corporations are structured).

Yes, but Google has told him they will honor the robots.txt file. If he doesn't want them searching his site, he can tell them to sod off and they'll merrily go on their way ignoring every precious bit of content on his site.

The problem is that he wants them to search his site - he wants those links to show up in Google News and have the traffic directed to his websites. But he wants Google to pay him for the privilege of providing that traffic to him. To anyone who has an understanding of how the Internet works this sounds like an utterly ludicrous idea - the search engine is providing a valuable service for a content provider by getting eyeballs over to the site. But Murdoch works in the pre-Internet mindset. As far as he's concerned, Google is a copyright violator that is illegally syndicating his content without his permission. He's not seeing it as free advertising (which essentially it is), he's seeing it as Google making money off of his precious, precious content and he wants his cut.

This has been the burr up Murdoch's ass for well over a decade now - he wants the Internet to work like a syndication model and he refuses to understand that the model he wants would not only be completely unprofitable to him, it would make the Internet almost unusable at this point.

Microsoft has prior art on the big ass table computing concept.

Don't know what you mean by "professional Scrabble scene" but there are a good number of Scrabble tournaments around the world. I doubt the folks in the Scrabble tournaments play Scrabble as their only job, but there are cash prizes.

I don't know what the tournaments will do with this rule. My guess is that they will ditch it - it would be too hard to adjudicate in a tournament setting, I'd think.

The title of the Slashdot summary is unsurprisingly misleading and inflammatory. Reading TFA it doesn't suggest that money going into compliance is "wasted" - it suggests that companies aren't spending enough money to protect their own IP from corporate thieves.

IOW - the article suggests that companies are spending the same amount of money to protect so-called "custodial" data (i.e. information they've collected about their employees and customers that are protected by HIPAA and other statutes) and their own IP. But the financial losses from losing their own IP are substantially higher than the losses they'll incur through leakage of "custodial" data, so they actually should be spending more money protecting custodial data than they spend on protecting custodial data.

The underlying assumption in the article is that, unless you've implemented your compliance stupidly, you actually can't fix this disparity by spending less money. You can't cut your budget on compliance because it's required by statute. So instead you should be spending more money on protecting IP assets so that the ratios more realistically reflect the importance of the data being protected. Money that Microsoft and RSA, the funders of the study, are happy to take to help you implement solutions to protect your oh-so-valuable IP assets.

As a predictor, stuff like twitter or facebook or blogs can tell you what might be popular. Twitter is particularly a good indicator because with a few exceptions people use it as if it was a private conversation among small groups of friends even though in reality they're broadcasting to the entire world. That means you've got a good set of data from people in certain demographics (mostly people with extra time and money to spend on entertainment - exactly the demographic that movie marketers are looking for).

If you're looking for stock picks, data off of twitter is probably not a good bet. The same folks who are going to be able to tell you what movies are going to be popular this weekend (not necessarily good - just popular) are probably not going to be able to give an indication of what stocks are going to be going up this week.

OTOH, I suppose Twitter might be usable for a pump-and-dump scam. If you can figure out a way to get day traders twittering. But then, the yahoo finance message boards are already pretty good for pump-and-dump scams, and I'm not sure that twitter really provides anything new on that front.

Not his math, the math of the reviewer he's quoting. Which is quoted in TFA. Which was the point of his posting the line under the subject "Greatest Opening to a book review ever:".

When they were kicking IBM around in the 80s.

Computer Science 395 (Software Engineering): Remember how back in Programming 101 we told you how to perform testing on your code? Turns out we grossly oversimplified our discussion of how to go about doing that for pedagogical reasons. While it's nearly trivial to perform the test/debug cycle on code that you wrote for a class project that does one well-defined thing and will only ever be seen by you and your grader/professor, the scope of testing and debugging transforms radically when you attempt to scale this up to more general applications. Now, let's talk a bit about how real-world testing is done when you're debugging a giant project, with a substantial user base, spread over dozens of programmers, with code that contains elements that originated over a decade ago, some from programmers who left the company long before you finished Programming 101...

What does this have to do with hardware that he's not allowed to own?

If you run Windows on your PC, Microsoft doesn't do things that make it impossible for you to boot another OS on the same hardware. Wanting to run Steam doesn't mean that you can't dual boot into BSD.

Microsoft may be a "villain" in a lot of ways but one thing that they've always been fairly supportive of is the open hardware platform for PCs. In fact they're one of the few old-school software companies out there that has always been supportive of an open system platform. Yeah they want to lock in on the Operating System side, but they've been happy to allow you to do whatever you want with your hardware (unlike a lot of other tech companies - not just Sony).

The Xbox is admittedly a different beast and is an example of Microsoft trying to get in on some of the same action as their competitors. But as far as the PC side goes this is comparing apples and gorillas - Sony has a hardware platform that they control even after you've bought it. A windows PC is fully capable of doing other things and STILL acting as a windows PC, and other than finding new ways to make it a bit annoying to dual boot, Microsoft has done very little to actively try to muck with that.

(I'm openly critical of Microsoft in a lot of ways, but comparing a PS3 to a Windows PC and claiming that Microsoft is doing the same thing as Sony is just dumb. They're doing exactly the opposite of Sony on the PC side, which is why a lot of people are kind of appalled at the move back toward vendor-lock-in on the consumer electronics side of the computer business.)

In a perfect system, where politicians have only the best interest of the country at heart I'd agree with you.

We don't get perfection, unfortunately.

The handful of areas where better decisions might be reached by keeping things secret from the public are dwarfed by the massive number of areas where worse decisions will ultimately be reached by keeping things secret. Without knowing what's being discussed, we can't know which category it falls into.

So you're forced into either trusting the politicians to be good gatekeepers and trust their judgment to know which ones should rightly be kept secret and which ones should be openly debated, or you choose not to trust them at all and realize that some bad decisions are going to be made in a handful of cases to have the transparency you need to have a government run by the people, for the people.

Given that the selection process for politicians is not, in any country that I know of, actually done on the basis of their merit as intelligent decision makers who are able to navigate those kinds of ethical/moral quandaries (and is more often based on their aptitude at running a political campaign or what political party they belong to, neither of which really selects well for "governing qualities"), it seems like it would be better to err on the side of transparency, and allow that we're going to occasionally get some sub-optimal decisions in exchange for knowing what the hell our government is actually doing in our name. Since it's our government we really have the duty to watch it. And, frankly, whenever we stop watching it and trust it that's usually when the REALLY GODDAMN BAD decisions seem to get made in secret...

Don't forget, though, that patent protection is a government intervention into the free market for a specific social purpose that society has deemed to be important (i.e. spurring innovation by rewarding innovators with a guarantee of return on investment). They are not natural outcomes of a free market system, they are in fact a specific counter to a problem that the free market creates (i.e. tragedy of the commons). As a government-granted construct they need to be watchdogged very carefully because they are ripe for exploitation by individuals and corporations who would subvert their intent (spurring innovation) to maximize their own profits (as the market model insists that they should).

That's what this article alleges - that companies (and this company in particular) are subverting the implementation of the patent system in the US to maximize their own profits. This isn't a natural outcome of the free market, this is the exploitation of a particular social-engineering tool historically used by governments to manipulate markets in a way that is seen as beneficial to society as a whole.

You saw a report on the tee-vee news that outlined how the Nintendo 3DS is going to function, and there's no reporting about it on any tech blog or gamer site that even says "OMFG - CNN/Fox/MSNBC/Local TV station reports on how the new DS will handle 3D graphics?" When every tech blog, gamer site and newspaper that shows up on Google News suggests that Nintendo isn't releasing any hard information about how it's going to work until E3?

Link? The only news I've seen is that Nintendo is going to be demoing them at E3 this year.